Petite Philosophy

SELF KNOWLEDGE  A fundamental paradox of our minds is that they are filled with pieces of information which belong to us but are not known to us - pieces of data which may be utterly critical to our emotional flourishing and capacity for accurate decision-making but which elude our day to day to grasp. It follows that an urgent task of psychology is to devise tools that, rather like the claw crackers and spatulas served up in lobster restaurants, will grant us better access to the fruitful and salient bits of our own thinking. We should, in this regard, be especially grateful to a once world-famous, now largely forgotten nineteenth century German professor of psychology Hermann Ebbinghaus. Born into a wealthy merchant’s family in Barmen on the Rhine in 1850, Ebbinghaus was a brilliant student from a young age and by his early 20s, set out to explore through original research the paradoxes and secrets of mental functioning. He was especially interested in memory and in 1885 made his...

Sexuality We’re at a pivotal moment in the history of sexuality. For a decade or so, two American researchers, William Masters and Virginia Johnson, have been investigating the nature of human desire and are now offering a therapeutic service to couples in difficulties in their Missouri offices.  Up to this point, there was almost nowhere to turn. Sexuality wasn’t supposed to be discussed: it was hemmed in by taboos, myths and restricted notions about what might count as normal. But Masters and Johnson insisted that simply by having frank, non-judgemental and factually well-informed conversations informed by psychotherapy, a great deal of progress could be made. And they were right. We might guess at what could have brought this respectably dressed couple into therapy. Maybe he’s been having trouble maintaining an erection; perhaps she’s been masturbating on her own; there are things they’d like to try but can’t bring themselves to suggest to each other. The broader culture only al...